Old Dogs

Having earned his rubbish comedy spurs on Walt Becker’s biker comedy Wild Hogs, John Travolta returns on a fool’s errand to partner Robin Williams in the same director’s follow-up Old Dogs.

Via a series of arch plot contrivances that take twenty minutes to set up, it’s painfully established that Charlie (Travolta) and Dan (Williams) are friends and business partners. But the old dogs have to learn a few new tricks when, at a critical moment for their company’s development, divorcee Dan unexpectedly has to take care of twins he didn’t know he had. The stage is then set for the stars to take the kids to camp, dress up as boy scouts, accidentally take each other’s medication with spasmodic results, have their crotches nibbled by penguins and other demeaning activities.

It would seem almost impossible to dumb-down the already asinine anal dribble antics featured in Wild Hogs, but Old Dogs somehow manages it, throwing in a racist sub-plot about Japanese businessmen accompanied by a regrettable scene in which Williams gets accidentally trapped in a spray-tanning salon, and finds himself in black face and befriended by a number of passing Asians. For what’s supposedly a children’s movie, the crude humour of Old Dogs hardly seems appropriate for little shits of any age.